Tatum, over at AlwaysOn (a new blog site that claims to “invite some of the smartest chiefs, geeks, investors, boosters and wonks to come play in our spontaneous and uncensored arena”, and worth checking out) suggests that Wi-Fi isn’t ready for Home Media Networks.
Needless to say, I had to disagree.
“I’m not sure I understand your statement that 802.11 requires “line of site”, so it will only really appeal to dorm rooms or small apartments. In fact Wi-Fi works very well around a good size house. It can of course work through walls.
It’s also interesting to note that 802.11b allows for up to 11Mbps and 802.11g up to 54Mbps. A CD is encoded at about 1.4MBps. Allowing for packet loss and any other overhead, I’d say you’ve got music covered in your home entertainment wireless-LAN. Mpeg-2, the compression used in DVDs requires between 4 and 9MBps, and HD-TV uses 24MBps, so is not so far away when you consider that 802.11g has begun deployment. I can stream a good quality Mpeg-1 video (compression used in VCD with similar speeds as CD) to my laptop over 802.11b with no problems. Not the highest quality video, but better than some VHS I’ve seen.
I’d recommend you give it a go before you suggest its limitations.“
